The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer and convenience to users relates to real-time traffic monitoring systems. Currently, loop detectors and cameras are being used to monitor traffic conditions, such as traffic congestion, speeds of vehicles, etc. However, usage of loop detectors, consisting of physical inductive coils that are located on roadways and cameras to detect traffic conditions are expensive and may require a sophisticated fixed infrastructure.
Additionally, today's traffic monitoring systems may also consist of probe vehicles to monitor traffic. Probe vehicle based traffic monitoring applications typically provide better coverage with no additional installation or maintenance cost relative to a fixed infrastructure such as loop detectors or cameras. Probe vehicles are capable of monitoring traffic, reporting location and speed of the vehicle to a service provider, such as a traffic monitoring service provider. While probe vehicles may enhance a driver's travel experience, they are vulnerable to compromising the privacy of the driver. For instance, probe vehicles may provide frequent updates that may include the current location of the driver and even the identity of the vehicle's driver to the traffic monitoring service provider. Frequent updates of a vehicle's location might reveal a private location(s) such as a person's home, place of business, etc. and the driver may not want his/her identity known. In this regard, compromising the integrity of the driver's privacy may limit the number of individuals willing to subscribe to a real-time traffic monitoring service.
Anonymous collection of data samples in updates (e.g., where the driver's identity is not provided) sent from the driver's vehicle does not solve the privacy problem since these samples are still vulnerable to place identification (e.g., driver's home) and target tracking of the vehicle due to the spatial and temporal correlation between successive updates.
Another problem with existing traffic monitoring services which typically use installed sensors such as loop detectors and cameras to detect the location of a vehicle arises in situations where there is a significant traffic slowdown between two measurement locations which may utilize installed sensors to determine the location of the vehicle. Due to the traffic slowdown between the two measurement locations, there may be a long time interval in which the vehicle sends an update to the traffic monitoring service provider. For instance, if the traffic in which the vehicle is driving slows down or comes to a complete stop, there may not be any additional update(s) reported to the traffic monitoring service by the vehicle for a long time. In this regard, the traffic monitoring service provider may be unable to detect a slowdown in traffic flow which the traffic monitoring service provider typically would like to detect. Another problem that arises from this inability to detect the traffic slowdown relates to the freshness of data along the roadway where there is a long distance between update measurement locations. For example, if it takes too long to travel between the update locations, then the traffic monitoring service provider's traffic data will not be current because the vehicle must travel the entire distance between the update locations before data is reported again to the traffic monitoring service provider.
An alternative to location based measurements in existing traffic monitoring services consists of performing time based measurements as opposed to location based measurements. While time based measurements continue to report data even if traffic comes to a complete stop or moves very slow, traffic monitoring services utilizing time based measurements suffer from other drawbacks. For instance, in a traffic monitoring service that utilizes time based measurements, as opposed to location based measurements, a vehicle may generate random updates relating to traffic data, which oftentimes creates unnecessary network usage because an update may not be needed by the traffic monitoring service provider during the particular time interval in which the update is generated. As such, a drawback of time based measurements in a traffic monitoring service is that traffic data which may be useless is often generated which wastes network resources. Additionally, usage of time based measurements in a traffic monitoring service often results in invasion of one's privacy given that the vehicle may generate an update identifying sensitive information such as the vehicle's location, speed, etc. during a random time period in which the update is generated. For instance, the location of the update could be the house of the person driving the vehicle which may be sent to the traffic monitoring service provider. In this regard, utilizing time based measurements in traffic monitoring services suffer from the drawback of releasing potential sensitive or private information relating to the user of the vehicle.
Given the above described problems, there is an existing need to enhance the privacy of drivers in a traffic monitoring system and reduce the costs associated with a traffic monitoring system that uses a fixed infrastructure such as loop detectors and cameras as well as to provide an efficient mechanism in which to report updates of traffic data to a traffic monitoring service provider even when traffic slows down or comes to a complete stop.